page_title: Vincenzo Pipino
section_title: Early life
hierarchical_section_title: Vincenzo Pipino / Early life
caption_attribution_description: Teatro Malibran, Venezia, Italy
context_page_description: Vincenzo Pipino, also known as Encio, is an Italian thief from Venice whose exploits earned him the nickname "the gentleman thief". He is the first person to successfully steal from the Doge's Palace, and has been responsible for some of the most sensational art thefts in the city.
  During his lifetime, he has committed over 3,000 thefts at museums, galleries, banks, and private residences, 50 thefts of jewelry shops, and stole thousands of kilograms of gold throughout Europe. His activities have resulted in over 300 complaints to police, he has been arrested numerous times, and has received 15 sentences totalling over 25 years in prison. He once escaped from a penitentiary in Vaud, Switzerland.
  He has stated that he knows he is destined to die incarcerated.
context_section_description: Born on 22 July 1943 and raised in the Venetian sestiere of Castello, Pipino is the eldest of five siblings. His mother is named Cesira, and his father Antonio was from the town of San Nicandro Garganico of Apulia. His father was a ferry captain, whose income after World War II was at times insufficient to support the family. At school as a six-year-old, he sat at the back of the class because the teacher reserved the front seats for children of the siori. Famished one day, he punched another child during an altercation, and he was subsequently placed in observation in a psychiatric ward of a medical institution. His mother, opposed to such treatment of her child, removed him from the institution and found work for him in a mortuary near Santa Maria Formosa, where he dusted coffins and dressed the corpses.
  Pipino began stealing when eight years old, by which time he was working as an errand boy at a bakery and would occasionally purloin a pastry when hungry. His first theft was a 50-litre aluminum milk churn which he had to roll along the alleys; it was crushed and sold to a junk dealer. In a 2010 interview, he said that he stole a 30-kilogram bag of sugar from the Italian Navy while making a delivery of bread to the Venetian Arsenal. By the age of ten, he would sometimes steal croissants off tables at cafés in Piazza San Marco. Inquisitive by nature, he would explore the city on his own, and at other times lead his siblings through its many alleys.
  When he was thirteen, his mother, worried about his continued habit of thievery, invented a story about "La Gamba d'Oro" ("The Golden Leg"). It was about the ghost of a woman who had fallen in their apartment building's stairwell and died after impaling herself on a nail. She said the woman's ghost haunted the stairwell and the leg that caused her fall would glow, haunting children who did not arrive home in time. As a result, Pipino developed a fear of the dark, and he learned to scale the facade of the apartment building to avoid the stairwell. Because of his newfound fear of darkness, he resolved to improve his skills so he could operate during the day.
  His first major theft was at the beaches of the Grand Hotel des Bains at the Lido di Venezia when he was fourteen. He followed a rich American tourist who, in a moment of distraction in a beach hut, was unaware that Pipino had stolen money from his shirt pocket. To Pipino's misfortune, the large sum of money required a signature to exchange at the bank, and he was later arrested and served seven months in jail.
  By the age of fifteen, he had become an adept climber. He would sometimes climb to a window of the Teatro Malibran, let himself into the theatre, and set up a makeshift ticket booth at the theatre's back door, selling tickets cheaply to children who couldn't afford the theatre's prices.
  In 1968, he married a woman named Carla who worked as a glassmaker in Murano, and later as a maid. They have never had children.
caption: Pipino would climb the facade of the Teatro Malibran and enter through a window to watch films for which he could not afford a ticket
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